Assault of Thoughts - 3/14/2011

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- In 1993, Michael Kremer published a famous paper demonstrating that technological development increased with the size of a population, confirming some important characteristics of endogenous growth models and demonstrating that they do a great job explaining economic growth in the long sweep of human history. Gary Gunnels shares a New York Times article that describes much the same process in a more cooperative human pre-history than a lot of people expected. This line especially jumped out at me and reminded me of Kremer, with its explicit population/technology connection:

"Knowledge can in fact be lost by hunter-gatherers if a social network gets too small. One group of the Ache people of Paraguay, cut off from its home territory, had lost use of fire when first contacted. Tasmanians apparently forgot various fishing techniques after rising sea levels broke their contact with the Australian mainland 10,000 years ago."


- There's a lot of broken window fallacy talk going on in response to the Japanese earthquake, and I'd encourage people to approach with caution. A lot of what's been written is just ideologues using the tragedy of others as an opportunity to say horrible things about people they disagree with, and enlisting good thinkers like Bastiat to do their dirty work. I have a bunch of posts on how to think about the broken window fallacy here that people can review if they're interested. I don't feel like getting into specifics on this particular instance - it just turns my stomach to see how some people have been using this as an opportunity to slander others. If anyone knows any empirical studies of the impact of disasters on output/employment I'd be interested in knowing about that work.


- We had a great time in Richmond. The John Marshall House was interesting, and we had a knowledgeable and engaging guide for that. We saw the state capital and the governor's mansion. The White House of the Confederacy was kind of ugly, but it had a nice back porch. The Museum of the Confederacy was very well done. A re-enactor on hand demonstrated a lot of daily life in the army, and all the exhibits were interesting. They have an impressive collection of the effects of all the major Confederate officers, including a lot of Lee's possessions. We did not end up getting over to the Poe museum, but I had been there before. If anyone's in Richmond I recommend the Penny Lane Pub on Franklin Street. We also went to Legend Brewery, although that was more disappointing. On the way out we drove down Monument Avenue - I'm very glad we took that detour. They have some great statues of J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Matthew Maury, and Arthur Ashe. The whole avenue is lined with some really beautiful houses as well - it reminded me of the garden district in New Orleans.

On the way out we stopped by James River Cellars, which had a lot of great wines to offer. They were all pretty dry until you got to the desert wines which seemed to overcompensate for the other offerings. We picked up a 2007 Meritage (like a Bordeaux), which was a good year in Virginia and the last year they made the Meritage. We also got a Chardonnay. The man that did our tasting was a history teacher - we were telling him about the trip and he had an interesting perspective. He said "The war started in April of 1861 and it ended in April of 1865. A lot of people down here need to remember that". I was surprised he said it - certain tasters might not have taken it as well, but I thought it was nice to hear. I've never read all that much about or engaged the Civil War for much this reason. I don't want to dump on Lee or Jackson or the Confederacy in general. I don't want to make them out to be monsters the way a lot of people do. At the same time, the deep South made a very dumb decision and it pulled a lot of the upper South with it in that decision. They lost. It's long over. I kind of like this idea of putting it to rest. But you can't really get into Civil War history with that perspective very easily. All sides are too invested. If I ever substantially got into reading and writing about Civil War history the way I do with the interwar period or the early republic, I think I'd like to stick to the facts and just not even mention causes or motivations. I'm not sure if that's possible, though.

Here is a picture of the Lee Monument on Monument Avenue being unveiled in 1890:

Three things on Darwin

1. Gene Callahan challenges people who say that Darwin argued that the variation driving evolution was "by chance". I think he's basically right, but it's worth reading a couple more pages of the section that Origin of Species he cites for context. What Darwin is really talking about is probability, not necessarily direction. Probability is just another way of talking about our profound ignorance of the underlying determinants of the universe. It's especially amazing to read this and realize how immature genetics was at the time that Darwin wrote this.

2. Mark Thoma points us to Frans de Waal on evolution and morality. Stickman has shared the work of de Waal on here before, most recently his appearance in...

3. ...this video - a discussion by Richard Dawkins of the implications of evolution for social organization.

Happy Birthday Darwin!!!

The man revolutionized how we view ourselves. We see ourselves as much more a part of the world we inhabit after Darwin than we did before him. It's a little presumptuous, but I think it's still fair to say that we are the pinnacle of evolution thus far, but we are still part of a process that produced all the life we see. We're all connected, and that is an important thing to know as we approach life. Darwin was not the first to suspect this, of course. But he also gave us a way of thinking about processes that produce order. Order emerges because order survives adversity. Evolutionary thinking has spread to almost every other field of inquiry because of the power of this idea.

One of my favorite posts from just over a year ago is on Evolution and the Pitfalls of Teleological Thinking, which may be of interest to people on Darwin's birthday.

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I also can't help pointing out a Keynes-Darwin connection. John Maynard Keynes's younger brother, Geoffrey, ended up marrying Charles Darwin's granddaughter. They had a son - Richard Darwin Keynes - who assisted in biological research that lead to a Nobel Prize for the primary investigator, Alan Hodgkin. Richard Darwin Keynes also spent a lot of his career studying and collecting information on his great-grandfather's voyages. In addition to this work on his great-grandfather, Richard helped to edit a volume on his uncle - John Maynard Keynes, and his relationship with Lydia Lopokova.

This is John Maynard Keynes on Darwin in The End of Laissez-Faire (1926):

"By the time that the influence of Paley and his like was waning, the innovations of Darwin were shaking the foundations of belief. Nothing could seem more opposed than the old doctrine and the new - the doctrine which looked on the world as the work of the divine watchmaker and the doctrine which seemed to draw all things out of Chance, Chaos, and Old Time. But at this one point the new ideas bolstered up the old. The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition - that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that - free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalisation of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of ocean.

Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing - individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin."

Keynes's critique of the way Darwin was used here should be familiar to anyone that knows about the debates over "Social Darwinism". It also shouldn't be surprising, given the tremendous influence that the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore had on Keynes. Social Darwinism is practically a textbook case of the "naturalistic fallacy", which Moore discussed at length in a Principia Ethica (1903), a guiding work for Keynes and the entire Bloomsbury Group. Darwin emphatically rejected what would become popularly known as Social Darwinism in his 1882 book The Descent of Man.

What to expect from alien contact

In his Discovery Channel series, Stephen Hawking recently made two important statements about alien life: (1.) that it almost certainly exists, and (2.) that trying to contact it would be extremely dangerous. His point is simple - that alien life in all likelihood would see the Earth as a source of resources, and would come here to destroy us and take what they need.

Despite the clear thinking that Stephen Hawking has done in the past on the place of humans in the universe, I think his point here is problematic. Drezner raises a number of concerns with Hawking's point as well - many of which revolve around strategic considerations. But I think he even misses another important point.

We shouldn't discount the prospect that alien life will have evolved cooperative, friendly, rational, altruistic tendencies and a robust sense of universal rights - perhaps even property rights. And just as a considerably more advanced alien society can be expected to have stronger biological and technological faculties than humans, we should expect them to have more advanced social faculties. Daniel Dennett highlights the fact that while life evolving on other planets will of course be considerably different from life on Earth, there are many "good tricks" that evolution will "discover" again and again. He gives the example of eyesight (for organisms evolving in a transparent atmosphere) as a feature that is so advantageous it is almost certain to evolve elsewhere. Other things, like a base-ten number system - are considerably less likely to evolve again and again because in all likelihood it emerged solely as a function of our ten fingers.

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I would guess that cooperation, trust, and the recognition of some collection of universal rights are memes that would almost certainly evolve in an advanced species. Daniel Dennett reviews Dawkins's theory of memes here, and specifically points out the role that memes can play in overriding the underlying impulse to thrive and reproduce* (which itself is probably an evolved meme, or at least an evolved cocktail of hormones). Dennett focuses on destructive memes - like Wahhibism - but he also mentions more constructive memes, like the idea of memes itself! One of the most obvious "successful memes" is the ability to trust others, to cooperate, to exchange, and to recognize these things called "rights" which have no substantive or tangible basis but are nevertheless extremely important in human society. A great deal of research has suggested that it was precisely this ability of humans to trust each other and engage in mutually beneficial exchange (which is impossible without an understanding of property rights) that allowed them to dominate the Neanderthals (who did not have trade networks). Of course, this highlights the fact that cooperation and violent competition are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yet in the last hundred years humans have worked to make the two mutually exclusive.

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Why wouldn't we expect aliens to evolve that ability to trust, cooperate, exchange, and recognize rights? It seems like one of those "good tricks" that evolution will discover again and again. Certainly any civilization advanced enough to reach and destroy the Earth probably depended on some version of property rights and exchange to get to its advanced state.

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Obviously, none of this is certain. We don't have a lot of evidence to draw from. Some form of trust and exchange seems quite essential to successful evolution: trust and exchange to the exclusion of violence and domination seems much less important and far more tenuous, based on the experience of our own society. But I think there's reason to be optimistic. As Adam Smith said, "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market". Because trade, exchange, and cooperation are networked-based activities, they become more beneficial as the network grows. This is why I think there is an underlying tendency towards a global economy and a global government: and this tendency is implicit in the nature of trust, exchange, and cooperation. If it is implicit, then a unified planet operating on the basis of trust, cooperation, and exchange shouldn't be all that inconceivable. None of this is to say that a Spartan meme wouldn't also be evolutionarily fit. We seem to have demonstrated by experience that a Spartan meme completely devoid of out-group cooperation and trust is not evolutionarily fit - but who knows? I think Hawking is jumping the gun to just assume that aliens would be dangerous. They could be dangerous, but there's also good reason to believe that if they're more advanced than us, we may very well be the trigger-happy, belligerent ones.

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*Dennett's characterization of the impulse to thrive and reproduce is somewhat problematic and at odds with another Dawkins idea - the idea of the "selfish gene". Ultimately, it is selection at the genetic level that drives evolution, not at the level of the organism. Many organisms themselves have evolved the tendency not to reproduce because it facilitates the reproduction of their genetic code through other close relatives. Dennett glosses over his point here, but I don't think it changes the argument substantively.

Evolution and the Pitfalls of Teleological Thinking

Of Pelicans and Purpose

This morning, the Washington Post reported an incident where the Maryland Department of Natural Resources seemingly defied the forces of natural selection by saving pelicans that failed to fly south for the winter. My first reaction was the same as the article's title implied: "What exactly is the purpose of this? It's one thing to protect and rescue animals threatened by humans, but we shouldn't be rescuing animals who themselves fail to adapt". I very quickly thought better of that sentiment. Not out of any great sympathy for the pelicans, mind you. But because I realized that I made two primary mistakes: (1.) I wrote humans out of the evolutionary narrative, and (2.) I assumed that the death of this flock of pelicans was somehow an underlying "purpose" of evolution, such that avoiding that purpose would constitute an unnatural distortion of the natural order of things. I'll start with my second mistake first. This assumption of mine is at it's base a teleological argument - an argument that identifies a purpose or design for which a given thing (in this case natural selection) exists to achieve. I made the mistake of thinking "natural selection is meant to kill off those who will not adapt, so by preventing the fulfillment of this purpose the Department of Natural Resources is somehow violating evolution - or the purpose and design of evolution". This is the wrong way to think about it. Natural selection doesn't exist for any purpose or design. It is simply a description of what occurs. Organisms exist in an environment. If organisms are not adapted to survive in that environment, they will not survive. The organisms that do survive will be better adapted to survive in the environment. That is all natural selection is. It's really a tautology. There is no "purpose" to derive from it, and there is no agency involved either. Therefore, natural selection can't be "violated", simply because an animal that I thought shouldn't have survived ended up surviving.

As for my first mistake, I also wrote human beings out of the evolutionary narrative. I don't want to get too sentimental or hyperbolic, but I think it's safe to say that human beings are the pinnacle of natural selection (at least here on Earth). We've evolved a number of exceptional faculties that have allowed us to be fruitful and multiply; to fill the Earth and subdue it. One of these faculties is compassion, or altruism. We willingly do things for others, and we do so out of an emotional reaction of concern for their plights (sorry Ayn Rand - no thousand page novel or faux-philosophical exposition is going to change that). Moreover, our compassion and altruism is evolutionarily fit. We're not the only organisms to develop this sort of selfless disposition. Ants do as well, in case anyone feels too proud of themselves over the accomplishment. So how is it a "violation of natural selection," if a trait embedded in the human species by natural selection lead us to save a few stray pelicans? This isn't to say that the actions of the Department of Natural Resources don't have consequences. It's simply to say that when we think about those consequences, we need to think about it in a co-evolutionary way. Could the rescue effort hurt the pelican's chances of survival later? Sure. These pelicans have only demonstrated that they are capable of surviving if humans are there to rescue them. If they are allowed to breed with other pelican populations, future generations may be less capable of surviving without human aid. It's perfectly appropriate to identify that as a potential consequence. We just need to be careful when we assign either meaning, intention, or design to it.

Intention and Evolution

A good source for thinking about teleology and evolution is philosopher Daniel Dennett, who works with the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology. He is a strong critic of people who impute purpose to natural selection, or any sort of intentionality in evolution (i.e. - statements such as "X evolved Y to accomplish Z"). However, in looking things up for this post I realized that Dennett is more nuanced on these questions than he first appears. This is an interesting response by Dennett to two critics that is especially illuminating. I like this statement especially: "nothing without a great deal of structural and processing complexity could conceivably realize an intentional system of any interest"

His point isn't that intentional adaptation cannot occur, but simply that the natural selection that we have observed to date generally precludes it, and that any intentionality of any interest would have to be ridiculously complex. This raises two questions: one of intelligent design, and another of directed evolution (well, really one question, but I suppose with two actors). Dennett is an atheist, and so you would think he would slam the door on intelligent design. I think this piece is interesting because he actually insists on leaving that door open (i.e. - he refuses to be baited by the critic that demands Dennett "pick a side" on the teleological question). Nevertheless, of course he still expresses serious doubts. Just because he's open to the prospect of intentionality doesn't mean he thinks we've experienced intentional adaptation.

It also gets to the point of directed evolution, since most of the argument deals with issue or purposive adaptation (i.e. - "X evolved Z to accomplish Y"). Again, Dennett essentially rejects this sort of intentionality, but he doesn't entirely reject the possibility of it. This is another area where you better believe humans are going to (and have already) pioneered. We already intentionally evolve our environment. Rather than letting the characteristics of the species change in response to the pressures of the environment, we have changed the environment to better fit the characteristics of our species. That is innovative, but all sorts of organisms do that too. The ability to force your environment to adapt is an evolutionarily fit trait, after all. What is more exciting (and perhaps somewhat chilling) is the prospect that in the future we will direct our own evolution at the genetic level. This is fundamentally eugenics, and it's not something to be taken lightly. But it's also not something to be entirely written off. We have a bad history of eugenics in the past, but that shouldn't prevent us from thinking about directed evolution in the future. When directed evolution matures, perhaps I'll write another blog post about the need to be more open to a teleological perspective on evolution than I had been in the past.